stems: now she sings it! Listen, Earth sings!Rainer Maria Rilke; translated by Stephen Cohn"The Earth is like a child who knows poems by heart" is one of the Rilke lines you'll see most often quoted on the web, but there's seldom any attribution, and I wonder how many English speakers have seen the whole poem. The line comes from Sonnets to Orpheus (Part One, XXI), which Rilke wrote in February 1922, completing all 55 poems of the cycle in about three weeks.The inspiration for this sonnet came from a visit to Ronda, in southern Spain, in the winter of 1912-13. Rilke had overheard a group of schoolchildren singing in the Convent of Santo Domingo, accompanied only by a triangle and tambourine. He didn't know what their song meant, but the light-hearted animation of their singing is reflected in the cadences of the second and third stanzas.There are many translations of the cycle, but the one I like best--and which seems closest to the German--is Stephen Cohn's. Readers who know some German can see how faithfully he has caught the spirit of Rilke's celebration of springtime and childhood:Frühling ist wiedergekommen. Die Erde

I review British poetry for The Manhattan Review and write about music for The Elgar Society Journal. I also serve as one of the trustees for the Elgar Complete Edition, which is publishing a uniform edition of the composer's scores. My photographs have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have produced more than a dozen videos for The New York Times and McGraw-Hill.

I have contributed to textbooks published by Prentice-Hall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Oxford University Press.

My website is named after the world's first journal devoted entirely to literature and philosophy, launched by Friedrich Schiller in Tuebingen, Germany in 1795. Die Horen is the German name for the Horae, the Greek goddesses of the seasons.